Cather’s friend Stephen Tennant wrote of her commitment to evoke for the reader “the unseen vision, the unheard echo, which attend all experience.” (Lewis, Willa Cather Living) Cather herself insisted, in her famous essay in The New Republic, “The Novel Démeublé,” that “The higher processes of art are all processes of simplification.” She went on: “Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, it seems to me, is created.”
